… there’s this remarkable bit of writing on the subject of the American university.
The author glances at the latest sports scandals and writes
[This blogger] deplores the deplorable as much as anyone else, and only wishes readers could see how elegantly we wring our hands as each sad new story appears on our screens. Wring, wring, wring. Alas, alas, alas. Deplore, deplore, deplore. Repeat until Moral Seriousness is fully established.
Scathing Online Schoolmarm felt a frisson of sophistication reading this.
Allow her to reread it.
Yes. Again the frisson.
This writer has crouched down and taken a crap on Moral Seriousness. He has summited Mount Serious and crapped.
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SOS finds his debonair cynicism irresistable. The success of whatever argument he’s about to make about university sports is close to guaranteed.
The polemic announces itself in the title of his post: It All Begins with Football. The author argues that the very basis of our rich, globally dominant universities lies in the “tribal” appeal of their games, at which “shirtless boys” covered in warpaint whoop their way to abiding love of alma mater.
No naked tits, in other words, no money. Take away the tits and what’s a university? Buttoned up Mr Wizards, men incapable making the alumni cash register go DRRINGGGG.
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And you know, he’s right. Thinking back, SOS can date her decision to give money to Northwestern University to the first home football game there, at which she peeled off her sweatshirt and whipped them out.
A neo-Nazi group will be allowed to participate in Delaware’s Adopt A HIghway program, but can’t use the word “Nazi” in the signs designating their segment of the roadway…
“[Their] request to have the words ‘Nazi Party’ displayed on a state sign was denied because DelDOT chose not to associate the state with the term and its generally understood philosophy of advocating the denial of civil rights,” DelDOT spokesman Geoff Sundstrom.”
Scathing Online Schoolmarm read Mr Sundstrom’s description of Nazism to a randomly encountered man on the street (Mr UD, at the breakfast table). He laughed when she read it. She read it again. He laughed again. Why, asked SOS, did he laugh?
Mr UD put down his bright red coffee cup and looked away from his New York Times.
“Well… One normally expects a stronger statement about Nazis. It’s the bureaucratic care he brings to the subject…”
… in the Wall Street Journal.
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger once wrote that it is only necessary for a man to think one thought all the way through to the end. If only Heidegger, an enthusiastic Nazi, had taken his own advice.
Still, the quote says something about the German intellectual temperament, inclined to grind away at a single complex idea profoundly and often beautifully, year after year. Kant, Beethoven, Einstein, Porsche.
The Stuttgart-based sports car company has been unpuzzling the 911 idea for decades, and just when you think the rear-engine sport coupe can’t get any better, it does. It also tends to get more expensive, so if you’ve been longing for a new 911, brace yourself. The Carrera S I drove around the Black Forest in late October had a base price of $97,350… Philosophy majors need not apply.
Scathing Online Schoolmarm thinks this would have had more impact if the author had not hidden behind Heidegger and had instead begun with something like
The German leader Adolph Hitler once wrote that he had no use for knights; he needed revolutionaries.
And then onto the thing about the German intellectual temperament, etc.
Also: SOS thinks the writer should have put the price of the car in his first paragraph. Maybe something like
Hitler’s ideas cost the world dearly, and the new Porsche Carrera S will definitely set its purchasers back too — to the tune of $97,530.
This is how its author writes.
Two seismic forces beyond our control — the advent of Web. 2.0 and the inexorable influx of tech-savvy millennials on campus — are shaping what I call the new digital shoreline of higher education. These forces demand that we as educators reconsider the learning theories, pedagogies and practices on which we have depended.
The book, whose clunky mixed-up title I’ll let you discover at the link, wants us to know that it’s all good — all the twittering shit our students trail into class is all good. And even if it isn’t, it’s… what’d he say? It’s a seismic force, so you can’t do anything about it anyway sucker. It’s Nature, baby! Beyond our control! You think you can keep The Tumblr Temblor out of Classroom 25A Soltan Intro American Lit? It’s fucking inexorable! I’m not gonna argue the thing ’cause we all know it’s just a … a …. thing and you can’t do anything about things.
Nor can you do anything about pretentious writers. Look at this paragraph, with its pseudo-urgency and its self-importance (what I call) and its we as educators …
Huh? Educators? What’s wrong with educators, SOS?
I dunno. I can only report the following. Every self-respecting professor I’ve ever known has at some point said to me something like: The worst dread I have about dying is that my obituary headline will call me an EDUCATOR. It’ll say LOCAL EDUCATOR DIES.
I mean, maybe they haven’t said something so strong. All have, however, expressed contempt for the word educator, and have shuddered at the thought of it being applied to them.
Is it because we’re cynical lazy shits who don’t truly educate? No. Au contraire. There’s something about the word. Again, I don’t really know. I only know it’s embarrassing. And it’s totally not surprising to find it here, in this empty pretentious paragraph, the guy patting himself on the back for being an educator.
And – you know – those teaching practices of the past… We haven’t just used them. No: We’ve depended on them. We’ve been in a co-dependent relationship with them, and we’re terrified of losing them to those uncontrollable seismic millennial things.
Mobile apps, content sharing and these tech-savvy students can become a professor’s best assets in the classroom, even if they sometimes seem threatening.
Threatening? It’s a fucking Phuket coming right at me! And there’s nothing I can do. I, Educator, have lost control of my classroom.
But here’s the good news:
These students are helping us — teachers at all levels — with new ways to communicate and they’re motivating us to truly see the potential of the vast, shared and co-created information resources that exist within interconnected nodes. We’re being challenged to rethink information creation, storage and delivery. They are time-slicers, shape-shifters, creators and mobile connectors. The playthings of our students’ youth are becoming the tools of their future.
I haven’t encountered language like this since my late lamented hippie youth. We are da yout! The last sentence is positively Cultural Revolution boilerplate: THE PLAYTHINGS OF OUR STUDENTS’ YOUTH ARE BECOMING THE TOOLS OF THEIR FUTURE. GLORIOUS FUTURE! DON’T BE SCARED, EDUCATOR! JOIN OUR YOUTH. TAKE UP THE CHALLENGE.
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Send this guy a copy pronto.
… an email a law professor sent to one of his or her students.
UD should say that there’s no sourcing on this email. The blog Above the Law doesn’t identify its origins – school, professor, student. But someone sent the email to the blog, and the blog wrote about it, and I’m going to assume that the incident and the email are for real.
Background: A tenured law professor at an American university said some things in class that a student found offensive. The student complained to the Dean of Students. The professor now writes to the student:
I got an email yesterday from the dean that a student in this class complained that I have not been letting you out of class promptly at 10:20 and that I made off-handed, non-PC references to Parkinson’s and ADD. First, let me say that I will try to be more aware of both these matters.
But seriously – did you really have to go to the dean to complain? Not that after 30 years of teaching it has any negative influence on my job approval or the dean’s appreciation for what I do but don’t you think you are old enough to fight your own battles? Don’t you think I am receptive enough to be addressed directly? Are you going to go to momma and poppa if a partner at a law firm treats you wrongly? Seriously??
SOS says: This email begins promisingly enough. The writer is straightforward, direct, non-pretentious. Non-PC is a bit on the defensive side, but let it go. The professor is good enough to try to be more aware, etc.
As with the press release from the nightclub (see the post directly below this one), the writer should have stopped here. Good writing is in part about getting out while the getting’s good. One way to think about this is: What exactly do you want to say to the person or group reading what you’ve written? What exactly? Otherwise, what do you want to get off your chest? Take out all of the chesty stuff. Write with your head voice, not your chest voice.
A professor might legitimately want to convey to a student the importance of fighting your own battles. But this – and, actually, everything else in this email – would have been better conveyed in person.
I mean, if the point of this email is that the student should deal as directly as possible with human conflict, why is the professor making matters worse by writing this down? If the professor wants to claim that he/she’s “receptive enough to be addressed directly,” why not extend that courtesy to the student, and simply talk to him/her after class or something? Inevitably, an email from a professor is going to be more intimidating than sitting down and chatting like a human being.
But the really big bad in this email, of course, happens here:
Not that after 30 years of teaching it has any negative influence on my job approval or the dean’s appreciation for what I do…
UD hates the word inappropriate. But this is so that. All the professor does here is betray his/her anxiety/grandiosity… I’d call it infantile…. A sort of nyah-nyah. Not exactly the sort of thing to reassure the student that this professor is receptive.
Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: The day after a university athlete is killed inside your apparently overcrowded nightclub, go ahead and write your own press release if you’d like. But before you release the release, have someone who knows how to write one read it over.
If you don’t, what you issue may be a rambling defensive statement rather than the terse acknowledgement of the event/pledge to work with the police that it should have been. It may include the strikingly bad proposal that the same club host a party in memory of the person killed there.
Come and support this young man and his life at the A-List Lounge, dates to be announced.
… Going Cosmic.
Miami shouldn’t be given the death penalty, as Sports Illustrated argued again 15 years later. It’s big-time college athletics that should be.
The basic move is: We can’t do Local X until we totally solve Universal X.
It’s a fantastic deflection exercise, beloved of people who are always saying things like Better the evils we know.
… that only in sports writing are mixed metaphors considered okay. I mean, here’s the first paragraph of a New York Times piece about the latest Miami thing and about how nobody involved will be punished very severely because the people running the games are greedy amoral shits, etc.
As college sports officials confront yet another cheating scandal — this one involving Miami, the latest in a conga line of blue-chip programs that have recently stumbled into the crosshairs of N.C.A.A. investigators — speculation over the extent of the fallout intensified Wednesday.
A conga line made up of blue chips stumbles into crosshairs which emit fallout.
SOS doesn’t find this a very lucid sentence. Good writing is supposed to clarify, not to muddy. But never mind.
… to highly specialized writing — writing that has one, and only one, quite narrow, interest. This sort of writing is the very definition of monoculture. It is the essence of one dimensionality, the pure beating heart of the provincial.
This writing is But is it Good for the Jews? writing.
And you gotta love it. Who wouldn’t want the thick, murky world distilled to one obsession? Everything in the vast globe understood in terms of one mania?
Here’s a good example of the form. A Forbes writer takes on the epidemic of mental illness and psychotropic drug taking in the United States today. But exclusively from the point of view of people who invest their money in pharma stocks.
Let’s take a look.
He begins with the nightmare story of Rebecca Riley, a four-year-old killed with prescription drugs by her parents and the doctor who just kept throwing drugs at the family (her parents’ other two children were similarly medicated). The parents were both found guilty of murder. This murder, which riveted national attention to the depraved overprescription of powerful drugs in America, “may one day prove very important to investors in pharmaceutical stocks,” warns the Forbes columnist.
“[P]harmaceutical marketing executives are evidently undeterred by the law,” he goes on to note (they routinely market drugs for off-label use and routinely have to settle federal charges in the hundreds of millions of dollars — just the price of doing business for them). If they keep this up for much longer, and if nasty stories like the Riley thing keep making headlines, you might see a total ban on off-label use, and that would “cut into a major growth area for pharmaceutical companies.”
And what a growth area! “[T]he increase in diagnoses [of mental illness in America] is a boon to pharmaceutical manufacturers. The new generation of psychoactives has displaced cholesterol-reducing medications as the biggest-selling class of drugs in the U.S.” Think of the investment possibilities here! Figure you can convince say twenty percent of the population that they and their children need lifelong powerful psychoactive drugs to function! I mean, there’s no physical basis for the diagnosis, so you can go to town! It’s a can’t lose proposition.
Unless! Unless party poopers like Marcia Angell keep making noise:
Dr. Angell links the astonishing rise in diagnoses of certain mental disorders to the huge financial stakes of physicians, pharmaceutical companies and SSI recipients.
Keep talking about this, the writer warns, and there could be a “public opinion backlash” that might affect your profit margin.
But — probably not. The writer concludes on a reassuring note. We’ll probably see increases in dependency on psychotropic drugs throughout the population, thank goodness.
… hit back cleanly. Here, Newt’s press secretary defends his man against recent attacks from the lamestream media.
The press secretary strikes the right belligerent tone, but his mixed metaphors confuse us rather than rouse us to indignation.
The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment’s cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods.
Instead of gaining a clear picture of the press bullies, we struggle with three incompatible images:
1. A firefight.
2. Sheep.
3. Cocktail parties.
Our minds, striving to make sense of disparate phenomena, put it all together into a picture of party-going, pistol-packing, sheep. This takes us very far away from the image of embattled heroic Gingrich that’s intended.
Also – You want to end on a strong word. Here, we have a lot of exciting build-up, and we’re panting to see what actual evil thing the media has done to Newt Gingrich. But instead of a word like “lies,” we get the careful (cowardly?) “distortions and falsehoods.”
After all that firepower, this is a letdown. Big guns don’t shoot distortions and falsehoods! Not in the US of A! They shoot lies, baby!
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Update: Now, this is good writing.
The sheer spectacle of watching Newt try to live out his man-of-destiny fantasies and failing utterly — always in ways that were cringe inducing, yet impossible to turn away from — evoked something powerful that I couldn’t quite place. But then last night, I figured it out. It must have been Newt’s $500,000 Tiffany’s account, or maybe his apology to Paul Ryan. Anyway, I realized that everything about Newt Gingrich–the operatic temperament, the multiple divorces, the six-figure credit line at Tiffany’s, the ego, the solipsism, the sheer haplessness and capacity for self-delusion–it all summons up the “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.”
You see how his build-up ends with a bang?
Newt press secretary: Take note.
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Update: Graphic.
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In recital.
When Bad Prose Happens to Good People might be one way to subtitle this blog’s ongoing and best-known feature, Scathing Online Schoolmarm. SOS identifies and analyzes unfortunate writing – writing so bad that it can get an otherwise blameless person into serious trouble.
A sad and much-discussed current instance is Dr. Lazar Greenfield’s Valentine’s Day column in the official organ of the American College of Surgeons. His column so outraged members of that organization that the entire issue of the newspaper was taken down and the otherwise dedicated and admired Greenfield removed from his editorship. Other high positions he holds within the ACS are also imperiled.
Read the entire column here and get back to me.
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… Hokay.
SOS suggests that the heart of the matter, the essential offending language, lies here:
[There are] ingredients in semen that include mood enhancers like estrone, cortisol, prolactin, oxytocin, and serotonin; a sleep enhancer, melatonin; and of course, sperm, which makes up only 1%-5%. Delivering these compounds into the richly vascularized vagina also turns out to have major salutary effects for the recipient.
… [N]ow we know there’s a better gift for that day than chocolates.
SOS read these sentences to a randomly encountered man in the street – Mr UD – and awaited his response.
“Ick,” he said.
“Ick?” said UD.
“In arguments about ethics there’s this thing called The Ick Factor,” Mr UD explained. “The idea is that there might be something revealing about our moral intuitions in the ugh response to a situation or a statement or a person or whatever.”
“You’re talking about what my younger sister calls oogie?”
“Oogie, ick, ugh, call it what you will. Immediate visceral disgust.”
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Writing that’s obviously intended to be lighthearted and maybe a tad risqué turns out to be for many readers unfunny and gross. Let’s get clinical about why.
Clinical is part of the problem. This clinician has brought the stark unamusing language of the surgical field (richly vascularized, compounds, deliver/recipient) to his little editorial sally; and while mismatches like these can be funny if they’re self-conscious and over the top, their use here is simply a mismatch, simply an indication that the writer cannot exploit the jargon of his field for comic effect.
In fact there was a comic effect for me when I got to richly vascularized vagina; but it involved my laughing at a clueless writer’s weird paean to an organ.
My response to Greenfield’s language is not so much ick as … what? I mean, yes of course the content is off-putting – the best Valentine’s gift a woman can hope to receive is a spray of semen – but it’s off-putting because the writer is, as the Retraction Watch blog notes, “rather strange.” Good writing is supposed to pull you in, not repel you. Greenfield has written something as weird as it is disgusting, and in this alienating combination lies its failure.
… complete with wishful thinking …
[T]here is nothing wrong that can’t be fixed by 18 strong college presidents — that’s how many seats there are on the NCAA executive committee — acting in concert to curb their own worst excesses, and impose stiffer penalties.
… and the apparent belief that all university basketball and football players graduate from their universities:
They get a four-year ride free of the mountainous student loans that burden so many of their peers — a collective $900 billion worth. Ask any parent who is paying tuition what a scholarship is worth. Pay players? Please. We’re already paying them as much as a half-million dollars apiece over four years, maybe more.
And, pound for pound, there’s the insanest defense of playing football and basketball as an exercise in college-level intellectuality you’re ever going to see:
I don’t know that revenue-sports, basketball and football, are more valuable than any other performance-based learning experience, in which stakes are damn high and the audience brutally demanding. But they’re certainly not less valuable. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once praised sports as “high and dangerous action,” because, “in this snug, over-safe corner of the world we need it, that we may realize that our comfortable routine is no eternal necessity of things . . .”
Yeah. Take the game they’ve been playing since they were ten, put it on a big field with tv cameras, and watch it morph into a university subject. Jenkins wants football and basketball players to be able to major in I ran up and down a field today.
Much better, UD thinks, that they major in ethics, taking advantage of field work opportunities in cults of corruption at American universities.
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SOS loves the way Jenkins ends with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Reader: Make a note of it. To lend parting gravitas to your argument that football and basketball are university subjects, wheel out Holmes or Churchill or Lincoln saying they are high, and dangerous.
Dangerous, to be sure. They are full of danger.
What they bring to the university, however, is – so very often – unutterably low.
… is writing colorless, anonymous, committee-generated nothingness. You’d think a university president would know this.
Not only does he reuse exam questions. Professor William Bratton, U Penn law school, writes poorly.
Here’s an email he sent to his students about the reused questions:
Last Monday’s Corporations examination utilized a set of multiple choice questions that I had used previously at Georgetown. I reused the questions in reliance on an understanding I had with the authorities there pursuant to which multiple choice questions from my exams would no longer be posted absent my express permission. It now turns out that, unbeknownst to me, the questions were posted on the Georgetown Law website.
It has come to my attention that the some but not all students who took the exam had access to copies of the questions. Indeed, a group of five students notified Dean Clinton that they had copies of the questions within minutes of the conclusion of the exam. It is clear that other students also saw the questions.
Let’s (No, UD! Let’s NOT.) take a closer look (PLEASE NO.). It’s for your own good. Shush.
And let’s remember. This is not an address to Parliament, a Supreme Court presentation, a last will and testament. This is a simple straightforward note to students.
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Last Monday’s Corporations examination utilized [Never use utilize. Why not, UD? What’s wrong with utilizing utilize? It’s in the effing dictionary… Well, is it pretty? Is it human? Does it sound like the sort of sound a human being, or a machine, would make? Is there a better, simpler, more attractive, more human, less robotic, less pretentious word that would be an equivalent? Hm. Hm. Remember the word use? How is use different from utilize? Oh yeah. It doesn’t allow you to use a big long pretentious word in place of a short non-pretentious word. And if you’re Professor Bratton, you desperately want to be pretentious. Better pretentious than, say, apologetic.] a set of multiple choice questions that I had used previously [that I had used previously. Again, how lovely. And how remarkably L….O….N…G. Loaf and invite yourself to my prose! Take all day! You have nothing better to do with your time than delectate that I had used previously instead of I used.] at Georgetown. I reused the questions in reliance on an understanding I had with the authorities there pursuant to which [Hey, I told the guys at Georgetown to take the questions offline because I’m a busy important person not about to devote ten or so minutes to coming up with new questions…. An understanding with the authorities there … The authorities!] multiple choice questions from my exams would no longer be posted absent my express permission. [Absent my express permission! Off with their heads!] It now turns out that, unbeknownst to me, the questions were posted on the Georgetown Law website. [Unbeknownst, my loyal subjects! Unbeknownst!]
It has come to my attention that the some [Royals don’t revise.] but not all students who took the exam had access to copies of the questions. Indeed, a group of five students notified Dean Clinton that they had copies of the questions within minutes of the conclusion of the exam. It is clear that other students also saw the questions.
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